The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is a collection of five short stories by Denis Johnson. Each story features a first-person male narrator confronting mortality, loss, and fleeting encounters with mystery.

The title story follows Bill Whitman ("Whit"), a semi-retired advertising executive in San Diego with his third wife, Elaine. The narrative unfolds in loosely connected episodes. At a dinner party, a veteran named Chris Case reveals that the most silent thing he ever heard was the land mine that took his leg in Afghanistan. Another guest, Deirdre, asks to see his prosthesis and begins to cry; six months later, Chris and Deirdre marry. In another episode, Whit's former boss takes down a prized Marsden Hartley painting and threatens to burn it. Unlike a prior occasion when guests intervened, no one objects this time, and the painting is destroyed. Whit receives a phone call from a dying woman he believes to be his first wife, Virginia, who wants to forgive him. He confesses to infidelities and lies, then realizes with dizzying anxiety that the caller might actually be his second wife, Jennifer. When he picks the phone up again, the caller is gone. He decides not to call back, reasoning that both sets of crimes were the same.

Whit describes his friendship with Tony Fido, an eccentric, self-taught painter. A woman named Rebecca Stamos, a friend of Tony's unknown to Whit, calls to report that Tony has killed himself, and at the sparsely attended memorial, the mourners struggle to determine who Tony was. Whit's journalist friend Tom Ellis describes interviewing a death row inmate and then the inmate's widow, prompting reflection on repentance versus regret. Whit travels to New York to accept an advertising award and encounters a young man who identifies himself as the son of Carl Zane, a former colleague who died three years earlier. As the young man leaves, Whit inadvertently says, "Tell your father I said hello." That night, in a dim tavern, a glamorous woman weeping alone in an evening gown beckons him and says, "I am a prisoner here." He sits across from her, keeping still. The story closes with Whit reflecting on his most famous work, an animated television ad, and on his habit of reading folk tales before going out into his quiet neighborhood searching for magic.

"The Starlight on Idaho" is told through letters written by Mark Cassandra ("Cass"), a 32-year-old with a severe addiction, during his third attempt at rehabilitation at the Starlight Addiction Recovery Center in Ukiah, California. Cass writes to his fifth-grade sweetheart, his Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) sponsor, his father and grandmother, his siblings, fellow patients, the Pope, Satan, and his doctor. His turbulent history emerges: eight arrests, shot twice, homeless in Texas, and multiple failed detox stays. His mother has been in prison for 28 years after a violent incident when Cass was four, and his brother John is also incarcerated. Cass rails against the group facilitator but witnesses rare moments of honesty, as when a patient named Calvin tells his wife "I love you" during Family Group, the rehab's session for patients and their relatives. His grandmother disrupts Family Group by attacking the facilitator for suggesting alcoholism might be genetic. Most urgently, Cass reports psychiatric symptoms he attributes to Antabuse, a medication given to discourage drinking: He hears the Devil ordering him to kill and believes he might be Jesus Christ. After being taken off Antabuse, he feels grounded. He closes: "I Should Be Dead."

"Strangler Bob" recounts an unnamed narrator's 41-day stay in county jail over the winter of 1967-68, beginning at age 18 after stealing a car on Thanksgiving. His cellmate, awaiting sentencing for murdering his wife, introduces himself as Strangler Bob. The narrator befriends Donald Dundun, a cat burglar, and BD, who fell through a bar's skylight while trying to burgle it. On Christmas Eve, BD's brother smuggles in a magazine page soaked in a psychedelic substance, which they share. Strangler Bob tells them about killing his wife, then points at each young man: "Murderer. Murderer. Murderer." Years later, the prophecy proves apt. BD hangs himself in a Florida holding cell, and Dundun kills a bodyguard during a robbery. Dundun hides at the narrator's apartment afterward, leaving behind stolen heroin that triggers the narrator's severe addiction. The narrator becomes a drifter, selling his diseased blood to buy wine, and concludes that when he dies, BD and Dundun, whom he calls angels, will come to tally his victims.

"Triumph Over the Grave" follows an unnamed writer in Northern California serving as caretaker for his terminally ill friend Link. In a San Francisco restaurant, the narrator impulsively calls his friend Robert and learns from Robert's wife, Nan, that Robert died that morning of a heart attack. The narrator recounts his acquaintance with Darcy Miller, whose novel Ever the Wrong Man became a Paul Newman film. Darcy's old friend, the novelist Gerald Sizemore, reports that Darcy has stopped answering his phone and had been claiming his dead brother and sister-in-law appeared at his remote ranch. The narrator visits and finds Darcy calm but convinced the visitors are real. A week later, Darcy is found collapsed with dried blood around his head and is diagnosed with Stage Four lung cancer that has spread to his brain. Sizemore sits at Darcy's bedside every day for 31 days until Darcy dies.

The narrative returns to Link, emaciated and bedridden. During a storm, he rises, walks outside to circle the house, reenters through the back door, and lies down to die. Link's ex-wife Liz, whose memory has been erased by Alzheimer's disease, comes for a final visit; Link is the only person she still recognizes. Her current husband, Malcolm, brings her. Liz kneels at the bedside, then stands and says, "Night-night, Linkie. I love you." She turns to embrace Malcolm and greets him: "Hello, stranger." Ten minutes later, Link is dead. The narrator reflects on accumulating losses and notes that at the time of writing he is not dead, "But maybe by the time you read it" (150).

"Doppelgänger, Poltergeist" is narrated by Kevin Peter Harrington, a poetry professor turned literary critic, who recounts his friendship with Marcus Ahearn, a gifted poet consumed by a conspiracy theory about Elvis Presley. On January 8, 2016, Mark is arrested at Graceland for trying to disturb Elvis's grave. Harrington met Mark in 1984 as a student in his Columbia poetry workshop; Mark's talent forced Harrington to accept he would never be a poet himself. Mark's older brother Lancaster ("Lance") died young and was a twinless twin, meaning his identical twin, Somers Garfield Ahearn, was stillborn. Lance was obsessed with Elvis, who was also a twinless twin. Mark inherited Lance's Elvis record collection but sold it the day before Elvis died in 1977. Devastated, he took a bus to Memphis and joined an attempt to rob Elvis's grave. Over the years, Mark develops a theory inherited from Lance: Colonel Tom Parker arranged the real Elvis's murder in 1958 and replaced him with his supposedly stillborn twin, stolen at birth by a midwife. Mark's fourth poetry collection, Dreams He Eats, contains poems about a character named Somers Garfield who is recognizably based on Harrington. When Harrington confronts Mark, Mark reveals that Somers Garfield is the name of Lance's stillborn twin and tells Harrington: "You are the reincarnation of Somers Garfield Ahearn." Rather than feeling offended, Harrington feels liberated. "I'm your brother," he says. Harrington closes by quoting a recent email from Mark: "Life after death, ghosts, Paradise, eternity, of course, we take all that as granted. Otherwise where's the fun?"